For the last seven years, demands that state worker pay be reduced when California has no budget have been met with a consistent response from union-friendly state controllers: Their computer can't do the math. It's an argument that has outraged Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, bemused computer experts and elicited the skepticism of various court judges — especially as the payroll system has adapted to other complex programming tasks, such as calculating dozens of raises for unionized employees and slashing the pay of elected officials and their appointees to zero during Sacramento's budget crises. Although many computer experts agree that the state's...